ログインKNOX’S POV“No.”“He raised you.”“He saved me.” Nathaniel’s voice is stripped to the bone. “I was eleven. Living in the drainage tunnels under the old industrial district. Eating whatever I could steal. He found me during one of his community rounds — the pack clinics he ran in the low-income districts. I had a fever that should have killed me, and he brought me home and treated me for three weeks, and when the fever broke, he didn’t send me back to the tunnels.” A pause. “He gave me a bed. He gave me books. He gave me a name on medical forms and a place at his table, and he never once made me feel like a burden.”I let that sit. This image of poor, sickly Nathaniel rearranges everything I thought I knew about him.“His name was Petrov,” Nathaniel says. “And your father killed him.”The air in the car vanishes. For a second, the words pierce straight through my chest — not because they’re an accusation, because they’re not. There’s no blame in the way he says it. His face gives not
KNOX’S POVNathaniel pauses for a moment, then nods once. He offers no argument, rehearsed defence, or rationalisation. No carefully worded explanation for why twenty years of service should outweigh sixty-three bodies and a drugged cup of coffee. All I get is that nod. The absence of a fight from a man who has fought me on every decision I’ve made since I was seventeen was the most damning part. It is the silent admission that what he’s done has no defence, and any attempt to build one would insult us both.I stared out the window, and my mind did what it’s been doing all morning — reaching backwards, trying to reconcile the man beside me with every version of him I’ve known. Because the Nathaniel in that living room this morning, confessing to engineering a massacre, is not the Nathaniel I chose. Not the one I found.I was seventeen when I arrived in North America. Seventeen, with my father’s blood still under my fingernails because the flight from Zürich was seven hours, an
KNOX’S POVMy hands are the problem.Not in the way Nathaniel would diagnose it, not the gene or the claws or the shift. The problem is simpler and worse. I’m sitting in the passenger seat watching my fingers open and close around my own knee, and I cannot stop seeing them do other things.The boy was holding his sister. That’s the detail that won’t leave. Not the ballroom or the blood or the woman in the red dress whose face I still can’t fully see. The detail that followed me into this car is the boy. Sabias. Seven years old, holding his sister Mira under a bed in a guest room with a nightlight still glowing because someone on my staff knew the child was afraid of the dark and cared enough to plug one in.He was telling her to be quiet. That if they were quiet enough, the monster would leave.The monster didn’t leave.I flex my fingers against my knee. Open, close. Checking that the nails are blunt and human and that the things under them are not pressing through. These are the
EMBER’S POVMaurice’s face shifts. A new layer of guilt settling over the existing ones, and I’m beginning to wonder how many layers this man carries before the whole structure collapses under the weight.He stands and leads us through the house, past the bathroom where I used to lock myself during my parents’ worst fights, past the bedroom where I’d press my face into the pillow and pretend the shouting was wind, to a door at the back of the house that I don’t remember being there when I was growing up. A storage room reinforced and padlocked.Maurice produces a key from his pocket and opens it.The smell hits first. Stale air and unwashed body and something rotten under. The room is small and dim and in the corner, chained to a pipe that runs along the floor, is Gale Crawford.I almost laugh.He’s thinner than I remember. Unshaven, hollow-cheeked, wearing clothes that haven’t been changed in longer than is decent. His wrists are raw where the chains have rubbed and there’s a split
EMBER’S POV“The last visit was different. You were about six. The woman watched you playing in the yard through the kitchen window for a long time without speaking. Then she told your mother the drops weren’t holding the way they used to. That you were getting stronger and the doses couldn’t keep up.” He sets the mug down. “She gave your mother something different. She called it permanent. Said it would ensure you never felt your wolf again — at least long enough for Devika to live out the rest of her life without worrying about her past catching up with her.”“Permanent,” I repeat, and the word tastes like rust.“Your mother cried when she took it. That’s the only time I ever saw Devika Chamberlain cry.”“Did anything ever happen after that? Any episodes, anything that made you think the suppressants weren’t holding?”Maurice thinks. “You were about twelve. You had a nightmare. A bad one. You screamed with pain in your sleep, and every wolf in the neighbourhood started howling at th
EMBER’S POV“Never. Not once. Not his name, not his bloodline, not where he was from. Just that the affair was brief and that whatever he was connected to scared her badly enough to disappear.”“What did you do? When she told you.”Maurice’s face changes. “I lost my mind.” He says it plainly. “I put my fist through the kitchen wall. That wall, right there.” He nods toward a patch near the doorway where the paint doesn’t quite match the rest. “Then I got in the car and drove to every bar in a thirty-mile radius and drank until they stopped serving me. Then I drove home and drank everything in the house. Then I went to sleep on the lawn because I couldn’t find the front door.”“While I was inside.”“Yes. Probably alone and confused, because your mother had gone to a friend’s and the man you thought was your father was lying shit-faced in the grass trying to make the stars stop spinning.” His voice thickens. “I woke up the next morning with frost on my jacket and you standing over me in
EMBER’S POVI stare down at Knox on his knees, my pulse slamming so hard I can feel it between my legs. He's grinning up at me like a wolf who's already tasted blood, gold eyes glowing, fangs just barely peeking past his lip.I fold my arms, pretending my thighs aren't already trembling."What do I
EMBER’S POV(PRESENT)We stay tangled together for a long time, neither of us willing to be the first to let go. His hand strokes through my hair.My fingers curl into the fabric of his shirt. The room is quiet except for our breathing and the distant hum of something mechanical — a generator, mayb
KNOX’S POVHe blinks, the picture of innocence. “I’m not sure I understand. I explained the purpose quite clearly at the beginning of the evening. Conflict resolution. Closure. An opportunity for all parties to—”“Bullshit.”The word is deadpan, and I see Logan’s head snap up, see Gale’s sobbing st
EMBER’S POVI slump back into my seat unconsciously, not realizing how rigidly I’d been holding myself until the tension drains away.Knox lifts our entwined hands to his lips and presses a kiss to my knuckles, his eyes on me.It slows the tightening in my chest. Loosens the knot that Harrison’s qu







